Who would have believed, back when the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial came out in 1982, that by 2003 we would have the technology to identify planets orbiting other stars, and in 10 years would locate 900 such exoplanets?

Some astronomers are now certain that in another ten years we will find ET, or some slavering-jawed variant thereof, in our interstellar back yard.

The cultural impact would be staggering. How does ET fit into having 72 virgins waiting for you when you croak, or going to Hell because you were hoping for 72 virgins?

More seriously, there’s something these scientists are not telling us. In the 12 billion year life span of our planet, our species is fully 200,000 years old. But ET wouldn’t hear us back when we were building Stonehenge. He needs us to be transmitting.

Let’s say humanity survives another 450 years, meaning that for 500 years we are sending I Love Lucy to the cosmos. That puts the odds of ET hearing us at 1 in 240 million. Since ET should be smart enough only to look at planets in the middle third of their life span, the chances improve to 1 in 80 million.

Of course I’m not really thinking about ET looking for us, my interest is in us looking for ET. Let’s say we look only at planets within the Goldilocks zone. We have found a few, for example Gliese 581g. From the thin information we have, just a fraction of a percent will be capable of sustaining life.

However, we are doubling the rate of exoplanet discovery every 3 years. Some predict that we will locate the first truly Earth-like planet in 2013. Great! By 2025 we will know of 63 Earths and I’ll be pushing up daisies. By 2068 we will achieve a 1% probability of hearing ET call home.

Probabilities can be debated, but the issue of scale remains. How likely is it that we will be lucky enough to be looking for ET during the fraction of a % of a planet’s life when ET might actually be transmitting?

It’s easy to miss out on Big Stuff because of little stuff. Little stuff is not necessarily without value, but it’s ephemeral. Yet it occupies most of our attention, most of the time.

Here in the USA we took care of some little stuff by re-electing an intelligent, compassionate President, so this blog can put aside terrestrial politics and take a peek out there.

The featured image is of an astronomical telescope at Paranal (Peru) shooting a laser toward the Milky Way (click here for larger images).

No, this is not a bunch of juvenile astronomers trying to prank ET or blind UFO pilots! The laser creates an artificial reference “star” to calibrate the telescope to compensate for atmospheric blurring. Who could have imagined such technology!

This telescope may have been the first to capture an image of an exoplanet, the existence of which was only a theory in 1970 when I first looked through the 12-inch refractor at Keele University and saw Saturn hanging like a white gold orb in a setting of rings.

How far we have come in our understanding of the universe, and how much further we are going. For example, instead of humanity being forever isolated due to the dimensions of space-time, it seems increasingly likely that we will be able to detect life on exoplanets many light-years away.

Talking of Big Stuff, the $3 billion NASA Mars Rover Curiosity has found something. They are not saying much about it right now. This is partly because they are scientists who want to check their facts, and partly because NASA is dramatizing their missions to catch the imagination of the taxpayers who fund them. They are marketing their mysterious discovery about Martian soil as Big Stuff. Let’s hope it is!

Did you know that there is a web site where you, my fellow Americans, can create or sign a White House petition? What a wonderful demonstration of our Democracy in action!

I’m not telling you this because I want to crow about the USA, although it is another validation of my decision to become an American. I’m telling you because there’s a petition to sign.

The petition is about the extraterrestrial vehicle crash near Roswell, NM in 1947. Now there are plenty of UFO nuts out there, but I am not one of them. Much as I want to believe ET is watching us, the dimensions of space-time are so immense that the probability of our intercepting a signal from ET are depressingly low. So I have always been a UFO skeptic. Until now.

I came across the petition while researching Exopolitics for a “reality-grounded” science fiction novel I am working on. Here’s a page of quotations from reputable sources to whet your interest. There’s too much meat to this for even a skeptic like me to ignore it, so I decided to use my blog to enlist the power of the internet and social mediato help get those 25,000 signatures. Please, visit the White House petition site and SIGN THIS PETITION. We’ve only got until OCTOBER 10th, by the way.

You will have to set up a login for yourself to do so. Don’t let that deter you. You want to know, right? We all want to know, and We The People are entitled to know. This stuff is too important to be kept secret, and now they have given us a way to find out. If we get 25,000 signatures they will be obligated to respond.

Once you have that login, it will be easy for you to participate in other petitions or submit your own. No matter who you support for President, one thing is certain. The fate of our planet and our nation depend increasingly on how well our government functions (scary thought). Get involved, empower yourself, tweet this post, SIGN THE PETITION by October 10th!